Coffee Tasting and Selection

Part of our first series of online Vlog entries to share a little bit of what we get up to behind the scenes. We have been working with Tom and his colleagues for some time they help us with the importing of coffee from all over the world. They have their UK offices in London, so from time to time we meet up and try various different styles of coffee together. This helps us narrow down the farms that we are interested in. In this visit we set out about 8 different coffees that we were interested in. We selected some very different coffee, most of our expresses are made up of washed coffees as they provide a really smooth taste with reduced acidity. Washed coffees are great for producing smooth espressos but they don't necessarily have the complexity you might be after for a pour over styled coffee. When tasting the coffee we try and keep the end coffee making method in mind, as for many a super acidic coffee probably isn't going to be to everybody's taste in an espresso based drink. To analyse the coffee we use a method called cupping, the SCA have provided some excellent guidelines for cupping, but in a casual setting like this we are just trying to see what coffees have notes that we want to investigate in the future. This also works as a great sensory experience for our team. For quality and scoring we can use the full SCA protocol. At some point we will work on a more in-depth cupping video that we can hopefully use in some of our training programs.